She reaches toward me, a small, controlled movement, and something inside me snaps. Panic spikes so suddenly I can’t stop it, and the scream tears from my throat before I can swallow it.
“Don’t touch me!” I cry, my voice raw and jagged, echoing across the walls of the room. It slices through the air and ricochets down the hallways, the sound a physical force in itself.
Una freezes mid-step, her composure faltering for the briefest fraction of a second. Then the hallway erupts in chaos—shouts, boots pounding against concrete, barked orders, the crack of splintering wood. Her eyes go sharp, dangerously cold.
“No,” she whispers, almost to herself. “He shouldn’t be here.”
But he is. I can feel it before I even see him. The tension in the air shifts, heavy and electric. Matt. His presence is a storm rolling toward me, unstoppable and furious. Mine.
I suck in a shaky breath, my chest trembling, my fingers curling instinctively. “He heard me,” I whisper, though the sound is swallowed in the chaos around me.
Una’s mask fractures then, just enough for me to see it.
Fear.
She knows that Matt is coming.
And nothing—not Salvatore, not the guards, not even his own mother—is going to stop him from tearing this place apart to reach me.
And when he does, Una and Antonio will learn just how unforgiving the Four Points can be when they come to save one of their own.
Chapter 48
The headlights slice through the dark as we tear across the outskirts of Liverpool. The old mental facility rises ahead of us—rotting brick, blown-out windows, its silhouette crouched against the night like something waiting to strike.
“She’s here,” I rasp. It isn’t logic or evidence that make me say it. It’s a bone deep instinct—violent and undeniable. “She’s here.”
Liam kills the engine. The sudden quiet presses in, thick and wrong.
Jonathan leans in close, whispering, “Stay sharp. If they hear us coming—”
But the wind answers for him.
A sound slips through the broken building, thin at first, almost swallowed by the night. As it trickles in through Owen’s rolled-down window, I freeze.
Liam’s head snaps up. Jonathan lets out a curse. Owen goes still beside me, as if we can pretend we didn’t just hear it by staying perfectly still.
And then it comes again—clearer, sharper. Shattering the last threads of my patience.
A scream.
Herscream.
High. Terrified. Ripped straight from her throat.
It cuts through the dark and straight through me, detonating something savage in my chest. Every plan evaporates. Every warning disappears. There is no strategy anymore only Lily, only that sound, and only the need to end whoever caused it.
“Go,” I snarl, already moving, boots pounding toward the entrance as the world narrows to blood and fire.
“Matt—” Jonathan roars behind me.
But it’s too late.
Nothing on earth could stop me now.
I’m coming for her.
And God help the man who made Lily scream.
